Google search share drops, Yahoo! rises

Latest results from Comscore show a slight drop of 0.2 percentage points in Google's share of search in December 2007 compared with November 2007 to 58.4 percent. Second place Yahoo gained 0.5 percentage points to 22.9 per cent over the same period.
The reason?

According to Comscore, Americans conducted 9.6 billion searches at the core search engines, representing a 3.9-percent decline versus November. With many Americans traveling and spending time away from home during the holidays, search activity typically experiences a seasonal decline during December. Google Sites saw 5.6 billion core searches during the month, while Yahoo! Sites recorded 2.2 billion.
Here's what I think: The holiday season just might be the reason Google lost some share in the search engine market (for Google, 0.2 percent would be thousands and thousands of users). However -- Yahoo! has made tremendous progress in recent times (although it's in a financially tight spot). I'm not saying that there's any chance Yahoo! will beat Google, but right now Yahoo! is a much more worthier opponent than it used to be. Plus, Google's spot-free reputation seems to be facing scrutiny: not all of its services did well in 2007, and I'm even wondering whether they'll dump Notebook (read more here). Blogger seems to have lost out permanently to Wordrpress too, and I recently had a pretty hard time on Blogger myself (here).